[A Pillar of Iron] is a long and pretentious novel about Cicero which I found extremely annoying both because of its many inaccuracies (I made note as I read of some forty questionable statements) and because it builds up a picture of Cicero that seemed to me to be very far removed from the Cicero most classicists know. For a novelist to deliberately alter historical fact for artistic purposes, and to tell the reader that he is doing so, as Thornton Wilder did in his Ides of March, is one thing. But to set oneself up as a model of research and scholarship, as Miss Caldwell does in her Foreword, and then to present a Roman like Cicero as longing for the coming of the Jewish Messiah, and having visions of a nuclear holocaust, is quite another. The book has some interesting scenes; its picture of Julius Caesar...